Author and editor John Freeman will give a talk at Middlebury College on Thursday, October 25, at 4:30 pm, in the Axinn Center Abernethy Room, entitled “Seeing Things: On the ethics of place and space in the era of Instagram.”

What does it mean to be where we are, to see it, and to capture and disseminate it? How does seeing things deal with vectors of power, and what stories can’t we see? What kinds of experience needs to be told rather than shown, and how do we incorporate this into our own narratives? In a world of granular detail on reporting, and ever shifting planes of politics, this talk will address issues of sight and empathy, and how literature operates in a world driven by the I/eye. What parts of language have we forgotten?

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual, and author of two books of nonfiction, The Tyranny of E-mail and How to Read Like a Novelist. He was editor of Granta until 2013. He has also edited two anthologies of writing on inequality, Tales of Two Cities and Tales of Two Americas. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published by Copper Canyon in fall 2017. He is the executive editor at Literary Hub and teaches at the New School and New York University. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review and has been translated into twenty languages.

Freeman has also recently been named the recipient of the Energizer Award for Exceptional Acts of Literary Citizenship, by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Presented by the Middlebury College Department of English and American Literatures and the New England Review.